A Digger Explains Why Diggers Feel Betrayed... And What The New Digg Looks Like To Him

Kevin Rose deliberately ignores reality again! He and his team have posted various updates to Digg 4, but again and again, they ignore the underlying issue behind most Diggers' concerns. It's tough, as a longtime user of Digg and a former power-user who had the ability to help influence the front page, to understand why they would put the power of the front page in the hands of businesses. I'm not alone in wondering about this, and I've got a few examples of how things have changed and how us users are responding below. It's probably easy to rationalize that people "don't want change" instead of looking at the hard truth and realize that Digg v4 changed the way Digg works by redistributing the power from power Users to big media Publishers. The power went from people who were active participants in the community to companies who now see Digg as a promotional tool. The result? Diggers feel betrayed because Kevin and his crew took away their power. Sure, you might way, only a small percentage of users were power users (power users had the biggest change to go on the front page in Digg v3). That's true, but remember, everyone could become power user by being VERY active on Digg (not everyone can became a big publisher and get 50.000+ followers, just take a look at Twitter.) The feedback loop for power users was: You Digg your friend's submissions every day > you see what's popular and what gets most diggs > you submit that type of content. In the previous system, you were forced to take a look outside of your site (unlike the new one where you just have to plug a RSS feed) and see what Diggers prefer etc. In this new system you don't have to take a look at what's popular, just submit your stuff and that's it. There is no incentive for big publishers to make Digg a better site for its community. Also, as one Digger pointed, members have helped get Digg to where it is today and now Kevin Rose is raising his middle finger and not listening to what anyone has to say about the foundational issue Digg is facing now. Reddit is already seeing 50% increase in traffic and 30% increase in sales. It's the only site currently that is similar to Digg in terms of community/the way stories get promoted. Kevin Rose, Here is How to Solve the Digg Problem Kevin, get rid of Digg v4 and re-launch a totally new Digg where users have 100% of the control. It's should be very clear to you by now that Diggers don't want mainstream publishers getting involved in anything they do. Things have gone so bad that the only way to get people back is to re-launch a totally new Digg. Something like Microsoft did with Vista and Windows 7. No matter how much they improved Vista, people didn't like it because of the initial negative impressions. Microsoft did an experiment to prove this. Windows 7 wasn't radically different than Vista, but yet, people liked it and a big reason for that was the initial good impressions. Same with Digg. Get rid of this Digg, please. And introduce a new version. The main thing that worries me is, will Kevin finally take a honest look at what's happening? Or is he's going to stay in denial? Maybe the fact that many influential people on Twitter congratulated him has to do with it? Maybe he thinks the opinions of those people (who probably haven't used Digg that much) are more important than the opinion of the community as a whole? Hm...wisdom of crowds, anyone? Remember Kevin, things have gone bad, very bad. Fixing changes will not be enough. Revamping the whole thing might be the only thing that will save Digg. Getting most of the features of Digg v3, introducing small stylish changes and making it into Digg V5 seems like the only viable solution to me. What about you, dear reader? I'm a chief editor of FinderMind.com. You can view my latest list of people search engines here.

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A Digger Explains Why Diggers Feel Betrayed... And What The New Digg Looks Like To Him

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